The Haunting Call of Concrete: The Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan

By Mattie Colquhoun

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Sounds of Space

Southgate Estate, Runcorn New Town, 1977.

Created in the United Kingdom in the fallout of World War II, the New Towns Act of 1946 relocated people from poor or bombed-out housing into new planned estates to alleviate housing shortages. Designed New Towns were placed under the supervision of a development corporation, and the resulting building became synonymous with concrete modernism and failed utopian ideals.

Created by Gordon Chapman-Fox, the Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is a musical project that explores this history and its reverberations today. Looking backward and forward, Chapman-Fox explores the artistic traces of this modernist architecture’s lingering hauntology.

Mattie Colquhoun

When listening to your music, I was struck by a void that opened in my imagination. It reminded me of the opening shot in Blade Runner where a helicopter flies over the megalopolis of Los Angeles. There is something interesting in your work, where these kinds of cinematic sounds that have an association with science fiction are applied to the context of New Towns. How do you feel about those two things together?

Gordon Chapman-Fox

There is a very cinematic aspect to what I do, and I often think of my music more cinematically, in terms of a long Stanley Kubrick tracking shot or a slow zoom: the slow gradual reveal that opens up, and you discover more and more elements.

When it comes to thinking about New Towns, what I wanted to do was subvert. There was a trend at the time of people releasing electronic music albums that pretended to be long-lost 1970s or 1980s horror film soundtracks. These were all modern facsimiles from an older era. I thought the idea of a lost era was interesting, but I wanted to explore a lot less glamorous and far more prosaic cultural artifact. One that we encounter quite a lot in the U.K. without always thinking about it.

Although the first album’s title, Interim Report, March, 1979, is the world’s least glamorous album title ever, it has a cinematic quality. After it came out, this idea resonated not just with myself but with a wider audience. Initially, I was contacted by lots of people who had actually grown up in New Towns, like Warrington or Runcorn, who said, “You captured the essence of where I grew up.”

That was fantastic because I’m not actually from Warrington or Runcorn; I’m from about 10 miles away. I grew up surrounded by the architecture of this postwar period, when there was a big emphasis on brutalist architecture, concrete, and constructing these huge modernist structures. My childhood was filled with walking through those spaces, but I grew up adjacent to New Towns.

MC

There is a unique tension of going back to memories of a subject you didn’t directly experience but, in retrospect, you have a sense of. It isn’t nostalgia, exactly. Then taking the tension between this present feeling and the past to produce the visual material and sounds. How the tension between those two things then constructs something new: a “new” New Town.

GCF

This idea of a “new town” is really quite old. Naples means new town, and so does Neapolitan. Creating “new” towns has been with us for millennia.

The past is always part of the present in Britain. Although if you are in larger city centers, like London, you find recent buildings. When I say recent history, I mean since the Industrial Revolution and the last 200 years. However, the places in the U.K. that were transformed during those periods still have things that go back hundreds of thousands of years. There is a compression of time in Britain.

MC

The twisting of time reminds me of a quote from film critic Richard Brody: “The baseness of cinema comes from its use of the noise of production and consumption, which is the hallmark of 20th-century exchange. Typifying the warping of time and speed that increased manufacture brought to bear on modernist economy.” Do you feel that your music reflects this compression of time?

GCF

I am attempting to tell two stories simultaneously through the music. The first is about the hopes and dreams of the planners who designed and built New Towns, their modernist and political visions. The man who formulated the plan to develop Runcorn, Arthur Ling, was a member of the Communist Party. He was trying to build this sort of communist utopia, but Runcorn didn’t end up being one. I’m trying to convey the optimistic origins of these new towns with the sort of rather dour, pessimistic outlook of what they actually became.

There is also a huge political aspect to what I’m doing because, as soon as the 1980s rolled around and Margaret Thatcher took power as the British Conservative Party, the purse strings for these places was just cut off. That immediately set in motion their decline. The industry that surrounded these towns began to erode and led to their decay. There is a mingling of looking forward, looking back, and optimism and pessimism all rolled into one.

MC

That brings us to hauntology: the range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The different parts of culture that we are told have been vanquished and are no longer a thing, but actually still linger or persist.

Take, for example, New Towns that had a radical politics of communal living at their inception. Those political ideologies have been pushed out from most of today’s political discourse. If they still persist, however, it is almost as phantoms; when cultural amnesia fails and we remember things not only as they were or could have been, but can still be.

Do you see an element of hauntology in your music?

GCF

There is a lingering sense of the past, both positive and negatively. I remember a sense of community we’ve lost along the way that has been replaced by a sort of neoliberal individualism. I’m not saying the past was great, but there are things in it that seem to keep drawing us back.

MC

For me as a listener, the New Town period was a more socialist approach to the built environment that feels far gone. I was born in 1991 and don’t have those memories of New Towns, so it doesn’t feel backward looking. Personally, I don’t have a reference to what it is looking back to. The music retains a newness for me.

I was listening to your most recent album, Your Community Hub, while walking around my local neighborhoods, and it gave a totally different perspective on Newcastle—a sort of temporal twisting that opened up what the city could be.

GCF

Newcastle is an interesting example. There are a lot of postwar buildings in Newcastle as well as concrete overpasses. Roads almost on top of roads surrounded by these big gray buildings.

With hauntology, I’ve heard of people talk about things that were in the 1990s or 2000s that give them eerie or hauntology feelings. A freaky advert or something on TV they recall. Something in your youth that hit a nerve and resonated before becoming a buried memory that resurfaces today. You are looking back with a context of new information. Together, that memory and where you are today creates a kind of stimulus. I suppose it helps bring it back, but back to somewhere that can’t exist anymore, or maybe never really did.

MC

Absolutely. I always found it interesting how the likes of Mark Fisher or Simon Reynolds started using hauntology to name a new genre of music they were hearing      in the mid-     2000s. Music that was drawing from the sounds and media of the past, such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which still linger and create an eerie or uncanny feeling today.

It describes an uncanny moment of reflection, where the unfamiliarity of cultural artifacts associated with childhood – like the Radiophonic Workshop’s association with Doctor Who – returns to disturb the more settled cultural consciousness of adulthood. What we remember is a radical encounter with the new, which at some point became familiar, but still carries some lingering charge within us.

My hauntological experiences are significantly from another cultural period. For instance, I recall going to Hull Fair a lot as a kid with my dad, where they would be blaring out jungle and gabba from the rides. My later (more historical) encounters with rave culture were then layered onto those memories. In this way, music has this ability to both embody the ideology and context of a period of time, but also to separate itself out from that history. However, the history is always still there, whether the listener knows about it or not.

GCF

It is odd how culture changes and what was once revolutionary becomes a sort of background music. How the music from illegal raves becomes the music of the fairgrounds. The other night, I saw someone on Strictly Come Dancing (the UK’s Dancing With The Stars) performing to The Prodigy. I thought: This one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

MC

You mentioned that you didn’t grow up in a New Town yourself but visited and passed through them in your childhood. Do you think being an outsider to those spaces had an impact on you?

GCF

Definitely. A couple of times as a child, I went to the nearest New Town to me, Skelmersdale in Lancashire. We’d go to the sports center or the shopping center, and they had an eerie, futuristic vibe to it.

There was no history to this place because it had all been fields until they built Skelmersdale. The whole town was divided up with a gridwork of roads connected by roundabouts. You can just drive through it and see houses or shops in the distance, but come to another roundabout, and you don’t know how to get to the houses or shops. There is a distance between yourself and the place. It’s bizarre because you’re never quite actually there or in the place. It is always just beyond your grasp.

Runcorn was designed the opposite, as an almost a car-free town. Part of this socialist utopia was that every house was connected to a road with a place to park your car. The idea was that you only use your car on weekends to go away. Everything else you need would be within five minutes’ walk from your front door. The bank, post office, community room, chapel, and school would be in a centered hub.

The album Your Community Hub is about this. It sounded like quite an ideal way to actually organize a town if you were building a town from scratch. A lot of good thinking went into it but, as with many things, it just didn’t work out so well.

MC

Do you see this architecture that you’re referencing in your music?

GCF

In a way. Growing up in the tail end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, a synthesizer still sounds like the future to me. This is similar to a lot of the architecture in these New Towns. They were built with a kind of new modernist architecture that mixed clean lines with heavy concrete infrastructure. This architecture is synonymous with the sound of the synthesizers in my mind.

The embrace of this kind of architecture changed again with the coming of the Thatcher period, when Britain rejected modernist architecture.

Since then, it feels like this awful homogenous design of an Englishman’s-home-is-his-castle, where everyone wants their own detached home, even though it may only be detached by a couple of inches from their neighbor. They want a front garden, a back garden, and don’t want to live on a straight street. This makes all the streets winding estates with an architecture that is so homogenous and backward looking. It hearkens back to Georgian mansions and twee English cottages.

It is a suburban anonymity. Everywhere in the U.K. looks like that. Previously, there existed regional differences in the architecture, even within the U.K. Not anymore because everywhere looks like that. This all ties in with what you’re saying about hauntology and culture. In the 1990s, there was an explosion in an amazing amount of fusion and cross-pollination. Since then, it feels like culture has stagnated quite substantially. If you look at someone wearing clothes from 20 years ago, they wouldn’t look particularly different from brand-new clothes being made today.

We all live in the same houses. This awful homogenization is ironic, really, because we were told to fear communism because it would make everyone the same.

MC

That reminds me of a 2003 essay by critic Frederic Jameson called “Future City.” In it, Jameson discusses another essay by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas titled “Junk Space”, which Koolhaas describes as “a domain of feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing … Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia …” Jameson discusses      the essay as an example of how postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, has affected our understanding of      architecture. Even in the built environment, there’s this sense of plasticity that’s malleable and adaptable, but where everything homogenizes into a kind of mush, just like in the rest of late-capitalist culture.    

On the other side, however, there is the concrete modernism of New Towns. Even though concrete can have this connotation with what is domineering and unmoving, it also carries with it utopian and socialist ideas that still feel radical today. So, for Jameson, our assumptions are inverted. If our shiny plastic culture is “unmemorable”, then counter-intuitively, the immobile solidity of concrete is in fact more representative of real change, the future, the new.    

CGF

Yes, absolutely.

MC

How do you respond to the situation we have now? Can our memories point to something calling to us from the past? Might we be able to have that sense of imagination again, even if it‘s fleeting?

CGF

It’s funny because the new Labor government coming in has said they want to build new towns. It feels like the New Town movement is coming back to face a similar question of how to house so many people.

There has been nonstop building for the past 10 years, really. The small town where I live has doubled in population size during that time. Hopefully a Labor government will bring back this infrastructure spending, which is something that has been completely, utterly absent. With so many people, there needs to be new roads, new doctors, new schools, and all those things. On a fundamental level, we need new sewage treatment. There haven’t been any new reservoirs built in 20 to 30 years, so where’s all the water coming from? I hope that some of these things will come about. But I struggle to remain optimistic about any of our betters in Westminster because they lack the sheer ambition and vision of the planners and designers, and even the people who set up the New Town movement in the late 1940s. There is a staggering lack of ambition there.

MC

Maybe even the politicians can be reminded and have their imaginations expanded.

GCF

Politicians aside, I hope people will start to grow tired of this uniformity and popular culture. That there will come a time when people break free of those shackles. Maybe being reminded of the past will also remind people there is something else out there.▪︎

Pick up a album of Gordon Chapman-Fox'sWarrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan in Idea House 3, the Walker's collectible design shop, here.